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Leader's Insight: Forget the Silver Lining

I'm looking for something better in this dark cloud.

It's hard to keep pointing out silver linings in other people's clouds when storms rage in your personal life. But recently, God spoke to me from the clouds-sort of.

As I navigated through a turbulent week of ministry, another rogue wind of bad news nearly sucked the optimism out of my normally sunny sails. Recognizing that I was spending more time worrying than praying, I decided to take a day off to practice the spiritual discipline of solitude (spelled "y-a-r-d w-o-r-k"). It was one of those Midwestern spring days that began with plenty of sunshine and quickly worked its way into an irritable afternoon.

I stretched my aching back, looked up from my flowerbed at the western sky and chuckled. My mind had found some room to roam and a Peanuts cartoon flashed into my consciousness. Way back when I was a kid I had seen a cartoon strip in which Charlie Brown and his friends were lying on their backs gazing at clouds.

One of the gang, probably Linus, pointed and said something intellectual like, ...

March
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